Emerge, BEAM Bots, Nerves & AtomVM

I've poored a decent bit of concrete foundations in and around Nerves. I've done plenty of other bits of Elixir but today everything I do comes from the Nerves end of things. And I'm fascinated to see other projects take shape on top of and around it.

BEAM Bots is James Harton's run at Ash but for robots. Model the mechanics, derive the rest. Kind of. The project is still early, because robots are apparently relatively complicated. But it is fully usable. He'll be running a workshop and speaking at Goatmire on this topic. If you are on the Nerves Discord you can find Damir's video of the SO101 robot arm being used with it.

Emerge is a GUI library. Lots of Elixir folks know Scenic. It is a cool project, is in use in production and totally works for many cases. It is not very actively developed or maintained. Presumably there is a more active for somewhere within Kry10. Damir made Emerge and the state library Solve because he kept seeing implementations he disagreed with. During his time in a consultancy he worked with some people who found solutions fit better than anything else he had seen and he wanted it in Elixir. This video from the Nerves Meetup gives the gist. Also a a talk at Goatmire. And it follows on Damir's drone talk from last Goatmire.

Both of these libraries can work without Nerves. They are platform agnostic. But they both bank on Nerves for a solid foundation for building embedded devices in Elixir.

The fun thing is that we see Damir running a robot with BEAM Bots and James Harton recently dropped photos in the Discord of putting Emerge on various devices. Emerge will also support headless rendering so there are various ways in which you could get it rendering on smaller devices like MCUs. Ideally using AtomVM, the tiny BEAM-replacement.

AtomVM's Davide Bettio is also speaking at Goatmire. We don't hear as much what the AtomVM folks are up to day-to-day which is a bit unfortunate. But I've seen an increase in interest. Especially as memory becomes more expensive.

These are complimentary parts of the ecosystem coming together. Slap NervesHub on top of that for an IoT platform that does OTA, health metrics, remote support and more. Throw in some Nx for edge processing. Throw in Membrane for media. Throw in Phoenix, Ecto if you want. I have put together some utility devices for my work with Ash on them just for the easy API tooling. The ecosystem composes really well.

The things don't really overlap. There aren't really a pile of alternatives to pick between. Essentially you just grab the pieces of ecosystem you need and go. And some of the ones I mentioned are ancient now. They've been around for a good long while.

BEAM Bots and Emerge are both quite new. And they hew closer to Nerves than almost any other libraries and frameworks. I didn't come up with any of these ideas. The people were processing them entirely without my help. I didn't particularly know James Harton before Goatmire. I didn't know he had robots on the brain. I think last year's Goatmire triggered a lot of enthusiasm and peer-driven-excitement in some very cool people. And this year we see a fair bit of fruit of that. Cross-pollination of projects in workshops and talks. Lots of talk-driven development.

I think many of us look for an excuse to keep caring, keep pushing and the moment we can get someone else to give a shit about the thing we want to do. And hardware... The stuff Gus does triggers us all to do work. Damir ran emerge on eInk. New work has landed in NervesHubin support of yet-unannounced hardware. Frank is grinding down startup time for the Nerves Starter Kit second by second.

And this all benefits commercial products as well and the commercial users become feedback and potential jobs for the library and framework builders.

The pace is not entirely sustainable so taking next year off is good. But seeing people come together like this, excitedly doing their technical best and their favorite thing. It is beautiful. And you can join in. Put Emerge on something new. Build a robot. Try Nerves for the first time and talk to us on the Discord. It is all fun, friendly and interesting.

Thank you for reading. I appreciate it.